Thursday, June 22, 2017

Goal conflict is a necessary and central part of how
organizations work. This is true even if we ignore personal goals that may
differ from the organization’s and focus only on the goals that all have to meet,
at the same time, for the organization to function well. Cars are made in
production lines that require quality, speed, and low cost. Airlines require safety,
service, and low cost. Health care requires personal attention, standardized
procedures, treatment of all possible conditions, and again low cost. And
finally, important for this blog, an army requires its soldiers to inflict
injury on others, risk or experience injury themselves, and maintain mental
health good enough to go out and do it all over again.

A paper in Administrative Science Quarterly by Julia DiBenigno looked at the goal conflict between the U.S. Army’s commitments to
providing mental health care and keeping its force mission-ready, and her
findings are important for any organization. She addressed a fundamental
problem of goals that are in conflict: usually each goal is assigned to
specialists with expertise in that specific goal, so resolution does not happen
inside someone’s head but rather as an interaction between the people in charge
of each specific goal. Usually that is done by prioritizing one goal and
assigning the other goal to a service-providing or supervisory function in the
organization.

The U.S. Army exists for fighting, and naturally commanders
are in charge. But mental health care is also a high-priority goal because the
recent wars have put a heavy load on each soldier, and post-traumatic stress
disorder and affiliated conditions take highly trained soldiers out of action.
Many even commit suicide, spreading the pain more broadly to also affect families
of military personnel. This is recognized as a key problem by everyone
involved, but solving it involves negotiation between specialists. This leads
to push-and-pull with two frequent results: the health care provider is coopted
by the commander and serves the commander’s purpose, or the health care
provider stays anchored in the care identity and interferes with the
commander’s purpose. As a result, most conflicts are poorly solved: analysis
found that 5 percent ended with a good mutual solution, in 85 percent either
the commander or the health care provider won the battle, and in 10 percent
both lost out.

But here is the key message of the article. The statistics I
cited were for only two of the four brigades DiBenigno studied. In the other
two, 89 percent of conflicts led to a good mutual solution, in 7 percent one
party won but not the other, and in 4 percent both lost. This is a really large
difference, and the reason for it boiled down to one minor change in
organizational structure with major consequences for the process. In the
successful brigades, each health care provider was embedded in the clinic but
also assigned as a point of contact with specific commanders, which led to
longer and more personal interactions than in the other two brigades. The
result was an anchored personalization: the provider was anchored in a group of
other mental health professionals who shared knowledge and norms, and the
provider had a personal network of commanders that allowed learning each
commander’s needs and earning trust as well.

The personal interaction proved to be central to
understanding each other’s thinking and finding adaptive actions in each
situation. It had a massive effect on the ability to find good solutions,
especially because the goal conflict was unique in each case. Mental health
issues are complex, but so are the needs of military units and their
commanders. Perhaps most remarkable is the origin of the difference in problem-solving
capacity: just a simple change in organizational structure that regulated which
care providers interacted with which commanders created a total change in how
these interactions were done. It’s an important lesson for organizational
design – how it is done determines what happens later.

Friday, June 16, 2017

Executives of large firms have been known to worry about social
movement activity of three kinds. There are movements that encourage various
kinds of costly state actions, such as cleaning up pollution or reducing carbon
emission, which at some level will lead to taxation to cover the cost. There
are movements that engage in boycotts and other actions to discourage firms
from various cost-saving misbehaviors such as farming out production to nations
with very loose labor and environmental protections. And inside the firm, labor
movement advocates take action through established unions or through trying to form
new unions where none yet exist. Responding to all this activity can exhaust
executives, and they might not like to hear that these movements are related to
each other.

How they are related is the topic of an article in Administrative Science Quarterly by John-Paul Ferguson, Thomas Dudley, and Sarah Soule. They look at how social movements outside the firm but in the same
city influence unionization drives inside the firm. This is interesting because
social movements and unions operate very differently, with unions under much
stricter rules and restrictions, so the influence is not a result of workers
learning anything useful about unions by taking part in social movements. In
fact, it is not even clear that they do take part in social movements, because
the mechanism behind this effect requires only that workers can see social
movements, not that they participate.

Unions are built on procedures and ideas, with workers’ rights and
equal opportunity among the most important ideas. It would make sense that the
presence of similar progressive ideas in social movements in the same community
could inspire union activity in firms, whereas social movements with more
conservative ideology might have less effect on unionization because they have
much less overlap with the ideology driving unionization.

This is exactly what the authors found to be true in U.S. cities.
Protests in a city led to unionization drives in the same city, and this effect
was stronger when the protests were related to progressive causes, including
civil rights and gender equality. So protests outside a firm filter into
unionization inside, specifically when the outside protests concern issues that
workers inside also care about. But
there are additional details that make things even more interesting. Unions are
not the only way for workers to solve problems. The Civil Rights movement and
the women’s movement also had successes with changing the law, which meant that
workers could contest gender or racial discrimination through the legal system
rather than through unionizing. As a result, these movements’ effects on
unionization were significantly reduced after the legal changes. So ideology
matters, but competition from the law does as well.

Protests
outside create unions inside, except when there are laws outside that make
unions less necessary. What does that mean for our situation now? The laws
outside are being weakened, and protests are getting stronger. Could it be a
time for more unions?

Friday, June 9, 2017

Here is a story that may or may not
be true: John F. Kennedy met a custodian mopping floors in the NASA
headquarters after normal work hours and asked, ‘‘Why are you working so
late?’’ The custodian responded, ‘‘Because I’m not mopping the floors, I’m
putting a man on the moon.’’ The story is almost too perfect to be true, but it
is a close match to historical events that show how the U.S. space program
gained its remarkable success, and it offers important lessons in leadership.

In a new article in Administrative Science Quarterly, Andrew Carton reports on Kennedy’s leadership of NASA in the
1960s, which culminated with the moon landing, and key lessons it offers to
leaders today. At the center is the knowledge that when people find meaning in
their work, everyone benefits: the organization benefits because its employees
work harder and smarter, and they benefit because work is a big part of life
and success and meaning at work increase well-being. So what’s the dilemma?
Usually meaning is best gained from a great goal, but such goals are often
abstract and distant from any one task at work. Linking lofty goals to concrete
actions is difficult to begin with, but it gets harder as the goal gets loftier.
So meaningful work is wonderful, but it’s hard to create.

Here are two examples. First, Amazon
seeks to give meaning through its goal of being the earth’s most customer-centric
company. How easy is it for this mission
to give meaning to one of its distribution center workers, who could be pulling
products from shelves or overseeing a robot pulling products from shelves? Second, it is part of INSEAD’s mission to
reduce poverty in the world, because economic growth is the cure for poverty,
and improved management helps economic growth. But the daily work of INSEAD
professors and staff is still education.

Kennedy found a way to direct NASA
that provided a simple, powerful, and very general way to address this dilemma.
First, he distilled NASA’s mission to one of advancing science. But advancing
science is not the daily work of a custodian, or even of an expert in
electronics who is designing control circuits, so the gap between the lofty
goal and concrete actions remained. So in between he placed the concrete
objective of a manned mission to the moon before 1970. That concrete objective
was not the same as advancing science, but it was an embodiment of the
advancing science mission that staff members could more easily relate to. From
that embodied objective more concrete plans and projects could be rolled out,
and anyone working for NASA – even outside NASA – could gain meaning through
connecting to them.

There are other important leadership
lessons in the article, but the idea of finding a way to embody an overall
mission in a more concrete objective is the most important one. It is also
related to an essential insight in management. Much management practice centers
on fluffy performances such as missions, speeches, goal statements, and quick
tours and interactions. None of this helps if it is disconnected from the
activities and meaning of organizational members. All of it contributes to success if it is
oriented toward the embodiment of concrete activities that people can use to
choose actions and construct meaning.

Thursday, June 1, 2017

A famous career effect on women is the glass ceiling – at
some point in the career, women find that it is hard to get promoted, harder
than it is than for comparable men. Because this has been known for a while and
is known to be an unfair and poor use of human capital, there is increasing
pressure from institutional investors for firms to promote women’s advancement.
This has created a paradox where many, but not all, firms are still set in
their usual ways of treating men and women differently, but their owners are
seeking change. What are the effects?

A new paper in Administrative Science Quarterly by Eunmi Mun
and Jiwook Jun has now discovered what happens as a result of these pressures
for fairness. It turns out that they come from two places. One is institutional
investors, who are concerned with fairness and best use of human capital. The
other is corporate social responsibility (CSR) associations and employees, who
see fair treatment of employees as an important corporate responsibility. Both of these help women gain higher-level
positions in firms that they would otherwise not have received. But there is a
catch, or more accurately, two catches.

The first catch is that at least now, the benefit of having
institutional investors and CSR representation in a firm mainly leads to a few women
entering the very top positions. So, it can give a board membership that
otherwise would not be possible, or top executive level position which would be
difficult otherwise, but at any lower level they simply don’t have any effect.
That’s why women in the top levels could be tokens to show outsiders that the
firm is fair, but without really changing the inside of the firm.

The second catch is that the emphasis on breaking the glass
ceiling is not an international trend. Much of it is driven by Europe and North
America, and has effects worldwide because so much of the world’s capital, and
hence institutional investors, comes from these nations. In fact, I did not
mention that this research is on Japanese firms, and the effect of
institutional investors is from foreign institutional investors, not domestic
ones. The domestic ones don’t help women’s careers. That does not mean that the
token effect is only outside Europe and North America – this research is
pioneering in showing that it exists precisely because Japanese firms are more
open about their internal hiring at lower levels than firms in most other
nations are.

So where does that leave women’s careers? A few token hires
do not really break the glass ceiling, they just hide it. In many of these
boards, one out of 12 members was a woman. But the research suggests that they
could be trailblazers too. Another finding in the paper is that women in the
board also helped women in non-managerial positions, so maybe they are the
start of more equal careers. Although we should be careful about drawing too optimistic
conclusions – women in the board had no effect on women in managerial
positions. We need to wait and see before we know how this unfolds.